My Name is Laika
Mojaffor Hossain
A novel that unfolds like a constellation of lives, each carrying its own private ache, centered on Alekh — who feels less like he is living than like Laika, the Soviet space dog launched into orbit and left to die there.
Full Synopsis
A novel that works like a constellation rather than a single story: a wide cast of characters, none of them minor, each carrying their own private ache and their own claim to being the protagonist. At its center is Alekh, who feels he does not belong to this world at all — that he is not truly living but merely part of an experiment, like Laika, the Soviet space dog sent into orbit and left to die there. That image becomes the novel's central nerve: a figure of collective and ancestral memory that Hossain uses to ask what it means to inherit a fate, and a loneliness, you never chose. Every living thing in the book, human and animal alike, seems bound by some version of the same inescapable curse; and yet the novel insists, again and again, on love and compassion as the only real answers to it. Ultimately this is not a novel about sexual identity alone, but about identity itself, and about the particular ache of alienation — of feeling launched into a life you did not ask for and cannot return from. Written in prose that is at once direct and exquisite, unhurried and precise, My Name is Laika reads less like conventional fiction and more like a philosophical inquiry carried by narrative — epic in feeling, though never in length. It is a poignant tale of loneliness, and the work of a writer at the height of his powers.
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Mojaffor Hossain is an award-winning Bangladeshi writer, translator, and literary critic. Known for blending native realities with surrealism and magic realism, his fiction has earned him accolades including the Kali O Kalam Sahitya Award, Abul Hasan Sahitya Award, and the Exim Bank Anyadin Humayun Ahmed Award. He has published sixteen books, including the acclaimed Timiryatra, and continues to be recognized as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Bengali literature.
